December 2010 - Second Year - Philosophy of Film
Q1. Does Craig (the puppeteer) at the start of the film survive as Craig (trapped in Emily) at the end of the film? Why or why not? What complications are there to his survival? Give reasons.
The movie being John Malkovich seems to presuppose that there can be physical and mental elements to the self, and suggests that one can have the experience of being self when disconnected from the physical. We encounter Craig's character at the beginning of the film as a person with a mind and a body. Later, Craig's mind is inside Malkovich and we are unaware of the whereabouts of his body. We cannot even be sure that his body hasn't been destroyed. Leaving Malkovich, Craig's mind is returned to his original body or to one that is identical to it, and later in the film Craig's mind is trapped in Emily.
When Craig is in his own body, in Malkovich, and in Emily, what is consisent in each case is Craig's mental states - his thoughts and beliefs, his memories, his desires. There is psychological continuity - Craig's mental states are persisted through time in a continuous way. I think this psychological continuity shows us that Craig has survived when he is in Malkovich and when he is in Emily.
Even though Craig survives in Malkovich and in Emily, he is not the same person. Personal identity and survival are not one and the same. Why is this, what are the markers of personal identity? Is it psychological continuity, or physical continuity, both, or something else? Personal identity is much more difficult to define than survival. At first it seems like a combination of physical and psychological continuity would be sufficient as markers for personal identity. These criteria would give the correct answer that Craig is not the same as Craig in Malkovich and Craig in Emily (though Craig survives, his physical state does not have continuity). But these criteria are problematic when we consider fission, as in the transporter case.
Suppose a transporter existed that allowed a person to be transported from Melbourne to New York in an instant. The process would work by destroying the person in Melbourne and creating a copy of their physical and mental states, in New York. We could say that physical and psychological continuity are preserved as the copy that is created is identical in every case. But suppose due to a machine malfunction two copies were created. Identity is a necessarily one to one relationship, it cannot exist for one to many, so it cannot be so that physical and psychological continuity are sufficient markers for personal identity. \
This is a problem Parfait explores when he makes his case that what matters is survival, rather than personal identity. It is persisted experience that is important, which is a sentiment that resonates with the characters of the film in two ways. Firstly, Craig is indeed surviving through the persistence of his psychological states, though his personal identity and physical states are changing. Secondly, Dr Lester is seeking survival over identity by desiring to continue his existence from other bodies, attaining a kind of immortality.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Q3. After having got Delores murdered Judah is wracked with guilt. According to William's is this kind of guilt rational for a consequentialist? Should we take Judah's feelings into account when determining the utility of his actions?
It is rational to feel guilt when we have done the wrong thing - wrong according to the ethical framework we believe in. When our ethical framework is consequentialist, then an act is wrong when it does not maximise the type of value the framework is concerned with. When our ethical framework is classical utilitarianism, an act is wrong when it does not maximise psychological states of happiness. So if we are classical utilitarians and we bring about consequences that do not maximise happiness, we have done the wrong thing and are rational to feel guilty. If we maximise happiness and feel guilty, then we are acting irrationally.
If we try to evaluate the utility of someone else's actions, using a classical utilitarian framework, we must take their psychological states of happiness into consideration. All psychological states of happiness are relevant to our calculus, regardless of who is experiencing them. When we try to determine the utility of Judah having Dolores killed, we must consider how Judah will feel if he proceeds, just as we consider the frustrated future happiness of Dolores, and the preserved happiness of Judah's wife, family, and community. The narrative reveals to us that Judah is heavily influenced by his religious upbringing and we can foresee that if he has Dolores killed, he will feel guilty.
But we are evaluating Judah's actions from a classical utilitarian framework, a framework that plausibly says more happiness will result from Dolores being killed. By that framework, it is right to have Dolores killed - so doesn't that mean Judah's guilt is irrational? This is not the case - Judah's guilt would be irrational if he was a classical utilitarian, but he isn't. We are assessing all forseeable psychological states of happiness, regardless of who is experiencing them, so we must take Judah's guilt into consideration. It is reasonably foreseeable that Judah, with his religious upbringing, will feel guilt for having Dolores killed. He would be irrational to feel guilt if he was a classical utilitarian, but he is not, and so we must include those guilt feelings in our moral calculus.
Q4. How does the treatment of "right" and "wrong" in Crimes and Misdemeanours refuse the resolution that is typical of Hollywood narrative cinema?
Hollywood narrative cinema typically follows a three act formula. A situation or problem arises, the characters involved in the situation address it, and then the situation is resolved (or shifts into a new situation). Typically the third act's resolution satisfies typical moral criteria - the cheating husband gets caught, the murderer gets punished, the nice guy gets the girl. By the end of a typical Hollywood movie, good is rewarded, bad is punished, and the audience can leave with a sense of an orderly, just universe.
In Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours, this treatment is not the case. Rabbi Ben, the character who most embodies the good, becomes fully blind. Murderous Judah, most embodying the bad, has gotten away with murder, and someone else convicted of the crime. He has even stopped feeling guilty for what he has committed and is now enjoying his life as much as before the Dolores situation eventuated. Woody Allen's character Cliff's marriage has ended, but this is hardly a dramatic resolution for him, the marriage was loveless from the beginning of the film. He had largely been a sympathetic character throughout the film despite his romantic feelings for Hally whilst still married, but he is not to be rewarded. His arrogant brother-in-law's behaviour goes unpunished, and is even rewarded by his engagement to Hally.
So Crimes and Misdemeanours is atypical in the way it does not reward and punish the characters according to any moral framework the audience would share. Instead it seems to favour an existentialist viewpoint - it posits that there is no independent or objective moral authority, and that the only meaning in life is that which human beings can freely choose for themselves. The character in the film who espouses the view is Levy, but though the film's outcome vindicates this view, we see that Levy has not been adequately comforted by this philosophy, because he chooses to end his own life.
If we were to replace the film's actual third act with a more typical one, we would see Hally and Cliff together romantically, with a hugely successful documentary on Levy's life. In the actual film, Levy's death destroyed the possibility of Cliff proceeding with his documentary at all. Rabbi Ben's sight would not have continued to worsen, and perhaps his sight would even be restored by god. Cliff's brother in law would be exposed as the arrogant and self involved womanizer he had shown the audience to be, and Judah would be imprisoned. These outcomes would leave the audience with the sense of a moral universe, but instead Woody Allen creates a tragi-comedy that reinforces existentialist themes.
MatrixQ5.
Explain and evaluate Putnam’s argument for the conclusion that the Brain-in-a-Vat hypothesis is inconsistent?
The brain in a vat hypothesis is a sceptical hypothesis, it proposes that what we believe we know to be true may not actually be true. We think we are having a physical experience of the world, of a blue sky, of sitting in a lecture theatre, but we may not be actually having that experience. We might really be brains in a vat, hooked up to electrodes stimulating neurons and creating the perception of the blue sky, and the lecture theatre. We might be being deceived.
Putnam has a semantic argument to demonstrate that the hypothesis is inconsistent. The argument rests on the idea that when the deceived experience had by the brain in a vat formulates the thought "I could be a brain in a vat", the thought does cannot meaningfully refer to a brain or a vat, only the image of a brain in a vat, which is something quite different. How does language meaningfully refer to anything? Well suppose we had a towel, and we had a Chinese noun for the word towel and a French noun for the word towel. The French word, the Chinese word, and the English word "towel" all refer meaningfully to the same towel. But Putnam's argument is we do not have this meaningful reference when the brain in a vat conceives of being a brain in a vat - the brain in a vat can only conceive of being something like a brain-vat-brain in a brain-vat-vat.
Putnam's argument is that a brain in a vat cannot formulate a semantically correct idea that it may be a brain in a vat and therefore the idea is self refuting. I think he is correct here - yes, what a brain in a vat could conceive of is a separate thing from what actually is - the brain-vat-brain image refers to something different to the brain itself. The example he provides is useful - if an ant randomly traces a line in the sand which spells "Winston Churchill", it does not meaningfully refer to the actual historical figure Winston Churchill, because it is impossible for the ant to conceive of him. But I do not think that Putnam's argument proves that we are not brains in vats, only that we cannot accurately describe the possibility that we are.
I think what we are really concerned about when we consider the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis is not whether we are precisely brains in vats (in which case, Putnam's semantic argument would certainly threaten the precision and exactness of our hypothesis) but whether what we are experiencing might not truly be reality. And this is a concern because we expect our experience to be authentic, to be objective, and feel undermined by the notion this not be the case. Chalmers matrix-as-metaphysics argument is far more useful here than Putnam's argument. Where Putnam tells us we haven't accurately described our possible predicament, Chalmers tells us we should not feel undermined. Chalmers tells us that it is our experience of reality that is important. If we are brains in vats, it is still true that we are in the lecture theatre of looking at the blue sky, it's only the metaphysical truth about what constitutes a lecture theatre or a blue sky that is different to what we first conceived.
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